Collectivism and Why It Works
Soviet Affairs Desk, 11/15/21
Over cocktails last night I had some pretty cutting ideas about the nature and origin of collectivism in the human animal. But then I got drunk. And did not write them down. And now they are gone. So we’ll just have to muddle through and try not to make asses of ourselves while we’re at it.
Collectivism. Socialism. The bane of every industrial or post-industrial economy. Where does it come from? And why won’t it stop? Obviously, it comes from within us, and has always been there. That’s not to say that there is a gene for it, but then again…we certainly evolved a propensity for it as we climbed down out of the trees, stood up on our hind legs and poked our heads out above the tall grasses….
In search of this propensity’s origin, look no further back than our dawn on the African savannah, when we lived in nomadic bands and tribes, each member closely related by blood; division of labor surely already existed, yet there was still enough trust between all members of the band or tribe for all wealth to be shared. A socialist paradise! But we, as a species, were too successful. We could not maintain equilibrium. Our mania for increase, as pointed out by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, led us to swell the ranks of the tribe beyond the Dunbar number: the average number of people—about 150—that a person can truly know and subsequently care about. That’s when things get sticky. Au revoir, paradis!
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond describes how chieftains emerged from these swollen ranks in order to settle disputes between members of a society who were not close kin and perhaps did not even know each other, and so could not settle the dispute between themselves without bloodshed. This is the birth of top-down government—the economy’s other bane.
With the Agricultural Revolution, man becomes shackled to the earth, and only those clever and/or powerful enough not to fall for that trap rise above it, into the echelons of the aristocracy and the monarchy—what today we simply call “thieves.” Oppressed by the needs of the soil and the thieving of the lords and kings, the peasantry is utterly blasted with poverty, barely subsisting through a long, dark night of the collective soul. Alexis de Tocqueville points out in The Old Regime and the French Revolution that it was not even until the power of the ruling class in France had waned and the oppression of the peasants softened that anyone even thought to revolt. That is, not until the emergence of an urban middle class who could make their living doing something other than raking mud on their hands and knees did collectivism re-emerge, this time not as a way of life but an ideology. The standard of living was generally already on the rise in France before the middle class intellectuals—the usual suspects in any socialist-flavored revolution—looked around at all the remaining poverty and started to complain. (Ditto the revolution in Russia*, where we can see an ironic pattern emerge: Only once the czars had become week and comparatively unoppressive did the intellectual class decry the remaining oppression, while the peasants went on raking mud, hardly aware that they were under the rule of any czar and certainly oblivious to the fact that they were “Russian”…)
So yes, as de Tocqueville makes clear, there were socialists of a certain stripe in France well before Marx and Engels ever got any of their bright ideas. The ideology appears to sprout spontaneously in the minds of young economic elites who have enough free time to sit around just thinking about shit and of course enough hubris to think they know how to fix the world. Leveling inequality becomes a Major Project. The folly of all social engineering is that it is a top-down attempt to force complex systems (say, the economy) to behave as if they are simple. As Pareto demonstrates with his analysis of distributions within complexity, attempting to prevent wealth from accumulating in an inequitable fashion is a hopeless game of whack-a-mole, and the more it fails, the more violent the whacking becomes. And the role of the moles shifts at once inevitably and tragically from the aristocracy to the underclass.
In the times of the French Revolution, the peasantry certainly resented the king, and yet when the Jacobin elites succeeded in toppling the monarchy, the peasants did not recognize their authority. And so our brilliant Jacobins had to go out into the countryside and crack skulls until the peasants, too, got wise. (Spoiler alert: They never did.) All these poor mud-rakers wanted was to be left well enough alone. But no! We’ve got a Major Project! Trust us—it’s for your own good!
And the same pattern plays out later in the sprawling atrocity that is the Russian Revolution, with the elitist thugs self-dubbed the Bolsheviks absolutely baffled that dissolving the monarchy does not immediately transform the peasantry into the proletariat. It’s almost as if all that Hegelian alchemy only works on paper! Those backward peasants wanted to be left alone to farm inefficiently and accuse one another of sorcery and fornicate in public—note: they were already living quite socialistically in their little villages—but the wise Bolsheviks had other ideas, such as expropriating (at gunpoint) more grain than the farmers could afford to give up in order to feed the metastatic military. The shiny new oppressors rebranded this grand theft as “War Communism.”
That’s all collectivism ever amounts to in a post-tribal world: Lofty ideas and clever wordplay. When the French Revolution was done failing so spectacularly that they ended up with a military dictatorship instead of a Brotherhood of Man, French society was more or less back to where it had started before Robespierre and his merry band of Very Smart Dudes ever got any bright ideas. (Again, we have de Tocqueville to thank for this observation.) And when the Russian Revolution was done failing so spectacularly that they ended up with a military dictatorship instead of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, well…it’s a wonder anyone made it out alive.
You could say that the men who made these revolutions were just trying their best under novel and imperfect socioeconomic conditions, and so to criticize them too harshly is the unfair privilege of hindsight. Okay, sure. You can also point out that what these men accomplished, despite their stated ideals and goals, was to kill a lot of people in order to make everyone the same.
I think the point here is that serfdom kept men and women so poor and demoralized that they never even bothered to question their roles as slaves, and when serfdom gradually eroded, well…we’re still grappling with the ripple effects, aren’t we? Still interrogating what it means to be free, and how much freedom we can actually acquire for ourselves and those we love. We’ve experimented with a lot of different ways to organize society, some infinitely more disastrous than others. The scars of collectivism are long and deep, and its fires can never be stamped all the way out. The best we can do in these harrowing times of ours is to inculcate our kids with a suspicion of it, and keep it away from the levers of power. Easier said than done, I know—I’ve seen the body count.
*Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy is a fantastic and exhaustive source of information on the Russian Revolution.